London Days: A Book of Reminiscences

by Arthur Warren

It was in the pit of London's theatres that I first came to know the London crowd, to understand it, to share its enthusiasms, or the reverse. It was in the Lyceum pit that I came to know how the crowd adored Irving, the place Ellen Terry had in its heart, and the place traditions held in the heart of the pit. Are there such pitites now, I wonder, as there were thirty and forty years ago?

Those first nights with the first favourites dissolved my American notions of the British character. I had heard, with the rest of the outer world, that the British were stolid, phlegmatic, cold, and what not, that they repressed their emotions, that they would not and could not let themselves go. I was to find what everybody finds, sooner or later,—that the individual and the mass differ as chalk from cheese. The pit crowds were not icebergs; they had not the immobility of mountains. They laughed, they wept, they cheered; they unlocked their emotions. They were the most sentimental, the most enthusiastic, the most appreciative crowds I had ever seen. The individual was dissolved in the mass. He became natural man. The crowds always took fire from a spark. They received their favourites as if they were conquering heroes. Irving, their greatest favourite, they received like a reigning monarch. One has to learn this about the British; their hearts are big and near their skins, and that is why, as individuals, they armour them.

If you know how to touch them, they respond with such demonstrations of devotion, of enthusiasm, of loyalty, as no other race ever equals in our time. Their loyalty to Irving they expressed with a zeal that was greater even than their appreciation of his powers, immense as that appreciation was. They loved the man. He embodied for them another lofty mark in the records of English achievement. He was great and would be greater by the integrity, the persistence, the elevation of his purpose. Such qualities win the English, and deep is the loyalty with which England rewards them. That, at all events, was true in the Victorian days.

There was a blessed vision called Ellen Terry, in those far-away Lyceum nights. Her power was charm. And she wielded her power almost to the end of King Henry's reign. In comedy she was alluring, audacious, delightful,—as Portia, for instance; as Beatrice; as any number of arch, graceful, incomparable creatures. In tragedy,—well, we forgave her the tragedies, her Lady Macbeth, for example. As Ophelia there was nothing to forgive; as Juliet—here was the exception to her tragic parts; she was a poet's dream, a fragile, loving, playful thing enmeshed by fate and borne down to death. Ellen Terry was the witching consort of Irving's reign. She won half his battle. "A star danced, and under that" she "was born." When Father Time told her that she could not play Portia and Beatrice and Juliet any more, half the attractiveness of the Lyceum was gone, and Irving had to carry the load alone.

But I have wandered far from the first night of "The Merchant of Venice." It was a great occasion. "Everybody" was there. To my gratified eyes the audience was nearly as interesting as the play and the players. Celebrities were "as plenty as blackberries." Now forty years have gone, and the celebrities have gone with them. And the nonentities, too. Of the two thousand or more persons who saw the performance that night, it may be that not more than fifty survive.

There is no one in these days to rouse us as we were roused in the late seventies and to the end of the century. The playgoer of to-day is fed on other stuff, on experiences quite unlike those his predecessors knew. And he is not fed so well. He is growing up, or has grown up, without standards. All's fish that comes to his net. I wonder what he would think of Irving if, by miracle, Irving could return to the Lyceum with undiminished powers, with Ellen Terry as she was in the eighties, and all the galaxy and circumstance that surrounded them? I think the playgoer of the present would scarcely notice Irving's mannerisms of speech, of gesture, of gait, he has seen so many mannerisms almost equally quaint, heard so much speech that is quite as queer. What caused Irving's mannerisms? For the life of me I cannot tell. They were not always with him. They grew upon him with the seasons. I do not think he affected them. He was too honest, too sincere for affectations. Besides, he did not need them to attract attention. And they injured his work. They were not caused by physical defects. They were entirely absent when he was not acting. Then his movements and speech were easy, pleasing. His manner had great dignity. I have said that his mannerisms were not with him in all characters, nor at all times. Intensity might bring them out. Declamation did so almost invariably. But they could not be relied upon either for coming or for going. What caused them? Self-consciousness perhaps, nervousness possibly. But why should he be self-conscious or nervous in his own theatre, where he played every night, and show no trace of either when he spoke at a university, or a dinner, or a public meeting? Why should he walk naturally and with ease in Bond Street, and with constraint, as if he were rheumatic, as Hamlet, at Elsinore, and why should he speak with perturbed vowels when he was in costume, and in easy control of them when in ordinary dress? The questions are easily asked; they have never been answered. If I have dwelt upon his peculiarities, it is partly because no one could ignore them, but mainly because he was so great a man that we can measure his powers by the obstacles against which he contended. His peculiarities of speech and motion may have been the causes which retarded his advancement for so many years. And, by the way, he was born in Somersetshire. Perhaps it was the Somersetshire dialect that cropped out at times in his delivery.

Irving's maltreatment of vowels gave much offence to trained ears. I do not know when I ceased, if ever I did cease, to wince at some of his pronunciations, but with time they ceased to present themselves as crimes for scourging, and came to be regarded as misfortunes, as penalties that must be endured for seeing him and enjoying him. When all is said, this thought remains,—the Lyceum productions were immensely satisfying; the beauty of them, the appeal to the eye, the appropriateness of everything that was painted, or woven, or said, or done; the groupings, the general and particular movement, whether of principals or supernumeraries, the tone of the thing, the atmosphere of it. When was the like known before? When since?

Seeing through the fog of mannerism took me a year. After that, as I have said, I grew gradually to appreciate him, to admire him. When I made his acquaintance, ten years after first seeing his Hamlet, I had long passed from the benches of opposition. But even then the wonder grew. First it had been: how did this man of many mannerisms ever become an actor and one of the most distinguished actors of his time? And then it was: how does he escape from carrying his mannerisms into private life? For he did not carry them there. He was a natural, unaffected gentleman, distinguished in bearing, courteous, fine in dignity, without pose. He walked and talked like a human being accustomed to the best of intellectual society, accustomed, indeed, to the ruling of men. He was then neither tone-bound nor muscle-bound. He moved with a certain ease, spoke with exquisite courtesy and quiet, and did not speak too much. He preferred to listen rather than to talk. He could—and did—make excellent speeches after dinner, or before the curtain. They would always have a touch of humour and a touch of pathos. They would always be in earnest. He never spent himself on trivial things; he never trifled about anything.

He had a certain air of authority; he had, at any rate, earned the right to breathe it. Besides, it protected him from bores. It made him, as a listener, the more gracious by just the suggestion of deference to an opinion, especially when he had invited the opinion. He preferred flattering to being flattered. Perhaps discreet flattery was an instrument that he knew how to employ better than most men. It may have been on that account that when it came his way he did not care for it. In all things he preferred giving to receiving.

Next to his work he enjoyed hospitality, that is, the exercise of hospitality. He did not like going out, and very seldom went out to dinners and receptions, those affairs of which one grows weary in London, because there are so many of them, and the celebrity is so often a sacrifice. He enjoyed being the host. This gave him the right of selection, with the minimum of sacrifice.